Building Better Teachers

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Dana Goldstein, writing about our need for better teachers, sums up my skepticism over the entire ed reform agenda in one sentence:

But what if the United States is doing teacher reform all wrong?

Well, yes. What if we are? Unfortunately, this is a question that hangs over practically every initiative to improve our schools. We just don’t know for sure if they work, and studies to prove things one way or the other are almost impossible to conduct properly.

So what’s the problem with our efforts to build better teachers, anyway? Are we doing it all wrong?

That’s the suggestion of a new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, a think tank funded mostly by large corporations and their affiliated foundations. The report takes a close look at how the countries that are kicking our academic butts — Finland, China and Canada — recruit, prepare and evaluate teachers. What it finds are policy agendas vastly different from our own, in which prospective educators are expected to spend a long time preparing for the classroom and are then given significant autonomy in how to teach, with many fewer incentives and punishments tied to standardized tests.

OK, fine. Here’s some anecdotal evidence that this might be true. It comes from my mother, who was talking to one of her old teacher buddies, who recently got a job teaching teachers how to teach students to write critically about literature. Apparently it’s to improve the performance of kids in AP English classes, who have been immersed in the wretched five-paragraph format their entire lives and don’t know how to write coherently about abstract subjects.

And that’s fine. But my reaction was the same as my mother’s: aren’t AP English teachers supposed to know how to do this already? Why do they need a coach? What have they been doing their entire teaching careers if they haven’t been teaching their kids how to write about literature?

So that’s that. But of course, the plural of anecdote is claptrap, so this doesn’t mean anything. The real question is whether better trained teachers in the Finnish mode are really what we need to get better schools. Considering the almost universal contempt that teachers and everyone else have for ed schools, that’s either hard to believe or else self-evidently true. I can’t quite tell which. But there are a lot of other reasons that Finnish and Chinese schools might produce better test scores than ours, and adopting their models of teacher training would be fantastically expensive. So we had better figure it out before we commit to some massive nationwide program to train better teachers.

But how do we figure it out? Good question. See the beginning of this post for my non-answer.

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